The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own. Nor, for all their striving, do they understand the qualities that lead to the highest achievement. Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools don’t correlate well with fulfillment, or even with outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine alternate futures. In short, these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be.

Help comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways.”

In a 1994 essay called ‘Puritans and Prigs,’ Marilynne Robinson challenges the contemptuous attitude many people have towards the Puritans — the very word is no more than an insult now — and gives a more generous and accurate account of what they thought and why they thought it. In the writing of the essay it occurred to her that ‘the way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism.’ That is, the kinds of traits we label ‘puritan’ — rigidity, narrowness of mind, judgementalism — are precisely the ones people display whenever they talk about Puritans.

And why is this? Why are people so puritanical about the Puritans? ‘Very simply,’ Robinson writes, ‘it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.’ That is, we deploy accusations of Puritanism because we know that the people we’re talking to will share our disparagement of Puritanism, and will approve of us invoking it. Whether the term as we use it has any significant relationship to the reality of Puritan actions and beliefs is totally irrelevant. The word doesn’t have any meaning as such, certainly not historical validity; it’s more like the password to get into the clubhouse.

Robinson further comments that this kind of usage ‘demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry,’ which may be the most important point of all. The more useful a term is for marking my inclusion in a group, the less interested I will be in testing the validity of my use of the term against — well, against any kind of standard. People who like accusing others of Puritanism have a fairly serious investment, then, in knowing as little as possible about actual Puritans. They are invested, for the moment anyway, in not thinking.“

… We all believe we source information from various channels… and that we then assemble, dissect, and analyze that information rationally before drawing our conclusions. But that’s not what we do.

We certainly seek input from many places. But we seek input that makes us comfortable. We seek input that reinforces our existing views and prejudices. We assign most relevance to information that is familiar to us and that we are comfortable with. This is known in behavioral finance as confirmation bias.

We also all suffer from another cognitive bias known as recency bias. Our experience of the immediate past governs our expectation of the future.”

And proper education is one long exercise in augmentation of high cognition so that our wisdom becomes strong enough to destroy wrong thinking, maintained by resistance to change. As Lord Keynes pointed out about his exalted intellectual group at one of the greatest universities in the world, it was not the intrinsic difficulty of new ideas that prevented their acceptance. Instead, the new ideas were not accepted because they were inconsistent with old ideas in place. What Keynes was reporting is that the human mind works a lot like the human egg. When one sperm gets into a human egg, there’s an automatic shut-off device that bars any other sperm from getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same sort of result.
And so, people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and attitudes that are not often reexamined or changed, even though there is plenty of good evidence that they are wrong.”